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The Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation wants to make the era of "write once, use everywhere" application development achievable with its open platform, leveraging unified memory addressing and other features. "It's fundamental that we can allocate memory on one processor, pass a pointer to another processor and execute on that data -- we move the compute rather than the data," said Phil Rogers of Advanced Micro Devices, the foundation's president.

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The Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation, backed by many big-name chip companies, is trying to resolve issues presented by demand for high-performance computing. "The essence of the heterogeneous computing model is that one size does not fit all. By combining GPUs and CPUs in a single system, it's possible to fully exploit the strengths of both architectures," said Ian Buck of Nvidia.

Online reports are reaching a consensus that the custom processor in Apple's new iPhone model will be faster than its predecessors. The chip is rumored to be a 64-bit processor, while previous A-series processors have been 32-bit models.

Intel has in the past year come up with custom processor designs for eBay, Facebook and more than a dozen other customers. "In the last year, we've delivered 18 custom silicon processor solutions for the full array of customers -- our direct customers, the OEMs and the end users -- in order to meet their specific needs," Intel's Diane Bryant said.

Inte's Xeon Phi processors are moving from heterogeneous high-performance computing to a new era of "neo-heterogeneity," Don Clark writes. The 12-core processors can be found in 11 of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world, he notes.

HTML5 development was born out of the necessity to address an increasingly complex matrix of device platforms and operating systems, Todd Anglin writes. After revolutionizing mobile applications, the desktop environment is next. "[N]ew operating systems that leverage HTML5 as a native app option and new packaging solutions that enable HTML5-powered apps to be 'installed' on traditional desktop platforms, like Windows and Mac," are in the works, Anglin writes. Google's Chrome Packaged Apps are also intended to help developers "write once, run everywhere," he writes.